Iron Giant Shane Mahan recently talked to Gizmodo about the construction of the real Iron Man Suits.  Enjoy the full story after the leap!

Mark Wilson for Gizmodo – If you don’t know the name Shane Mahan, that’s your loss. He’s the real Tony Stark, the practical effects wizard leading the team who constructed the actual Iron Man suit for the Iron Man movies. And he’s a great interviewee:

How many Iron Man suits are there? I mean, are there a lot of extras if one breaks or a piece breaks?

This is the conundrum because you always want to have a backup suit, a stunt suit, and we didn’t have a backup Whiplash suit cause the Monaco scene is rough. It has a set of rubber arms as well as metal arms, but Mickey ended up wearing the metal arms most of the time. But in terms of the Iron Man suits, we had very little. We had one hero and a couple of head backups but that was it, and the same for War Machine. We had one suit kind of work for the whole show.

So are you sitting there cringing on the set?

Yeah, absolutely. Of course, because you’ve got to make sure that the hero shots look great and if you do some stunt work in it, you’ve got to fix it back up. It’s challenging. Hopefully on the next one we’ll get a few more pieces to spread around.

It’s like having your teenagers take your Ferrari out. You don’t know where it is, and when it shows up something’s a little bit off… That was sort of how I felt the whole time.

So how many people are spending how much time actually constructing Iron Man ?

I think in the end, it’s a revolving door, with teams that come and go. I think we had probably close to seventy people and you’ve got four, maybe five months. Also, you’ve got not just the Iron Man suit but Mickey Rourke’s Whiplash suit, the drones and other aspects that you’re building. You’ve got teams of guys working at their limits. Whiplash’s suit was great fun because it was so different than anything that Tony Stark’s world has.  Full Story Here.